Twenty-Six Years Since the Death of Ta Power

Thomas 'Ta' Power
assasinated 20 Jan 1987

Today is the 22nd anniversary of a killing the signalled the onset of a war that nearly destroyed the Irish Republican Socialist Movement. Ta had accompanied John O'Reilly and two other INLA volunteers to Drogheda to meet with representatives of the Irish People's Liberation Organisation under a flag of truce to avoid an out-break of hostilities. The IPLO was an odd organisation, it had grown out of the cessation of Tom McAllister's brief tenure as INLA Chief of Staff, after Dominic McGlinchey's arrest, and what we then called Revolutionary Command, a vision for a sort of unitary guerrilla/political entity that MacAllister had for the IRSM. MacAllister was welcomed initially in the leadership position, but swiftly alienated virtually the entire political leadership and much of the army. When he first left the movement with his small band and emerged as the IPLO in the autumn of 1986, their first three actions seemed sound enough and it seemed that there might be room for more than one republican socialist organisation in arms operating in Ireland. That didn't last long. Tom's organisation absorbed two former factions from within the IRSM which had no business working together, one headed by Jimmy Brown and Gerard Steeson, who had essentially become head of the INLA in Belfast after Ronnie Bunting's death, the other headed by Harry Flynn and Gerry Roche, who had left the IRSM way back in 1983, when the Primacy of Politics became the order of the day, despite having been close to Costello in the early days of the movement. These two factions were bitter rivals. Steenson had disrupted Harry's brother Sean's run for the Belfast City Council and had even dispatched Bap Hughes to shoot Harry Flynn December 1981 and made an attempt to kill Sean Flynn the following month. For their part, the Flynn's faction had nothing but contempt for Jimmy Brown. It made no sense that they had found common ground and less sense that these major egos for the unfortunate era of the War Lords, as we later came to call them, would have joined an organisatoin headed by McAllister, who they would no doubt have thought of as an "upstart." Despite that, however, Steenson had corresponded with Flynn while in jail, along with most of the rest of the INLA, on the Super Grass testimony of Harry Kirkpatrick. What glue held these three factions together? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I said then and I still believe it was the PIRA. Despite ill-will between there respective members, the INLA and IPLO could have operated at the same time without it being necessary that a war be waged between the two organisations. If Steenson and Flynn could get past their differences, certainly the IPLO could have continued to exist without attacking the INLA. By that time, however, the Adams leadership had consolidated itself, having gained the leadership by posing as a left challenge to the traditional leadership of the Irish Republican Movement and in late 1985, when those who went on to form Republican Sinn Fein and subsequently the Continuity IRA left the IRM, the Adams leadership no longer required its left posture and was most likely already putting into place the accommodation with Britain that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement. They were no longer troubled on their right politically, but the challenge from the IRSM on their left became all the more troubling for them. I don't know what deals were made, but I do know that when the dust of the IPLO/INLA war settled, Tom McAllister was in the PIRA, as was Gerry Roche. Had the INLA not shot Steenson, I image the Provos would have taken him in as well, though once he was gone, they rebuffed Jimmy Brown, as they did Sean Flynn. Faye McAlliser, Tom's mother, walked away with the Irish Political Prisoners' Children's Fund, which had been largely built by members of the IRSCNA and handed it to the Provos as well. Once they'd cherry-picked what they no doubt thought of as the best elements from the IPLO, the Provos then turned on what was left of that organisation, finally acting to dismantle the IPLO following the death of Jimmy Brown by one of the young thugs he'd recruited, demonstrating that Brown's vow to kill Adams if the PIRA moved against them must have been taken seriously. In 1985, when all of this had begun to come to a head, Vincent Browne had written: "The leftward drift of the Provisional Republican Movement in the last five to seven years has robbed the IRSPj INLA of its clear identity - when Costello started the movement in 1975, the IRSP was the only identifiably republican and socialist moveement in existence - the Provos were certainly republican but then deepiy conservative, while the other major force in that political nexus, then Sinn Fein the Workers' Party, was clearly socialist but quickly shedding its reepublicanism. Since then the new leadership of the Provos, personified in Gerry Adams, has moved the. Provisional movement determinedly leftward, thereby threatening the raison d 'etre of the IRSP /INLA, especially as the Provos have always been able to deliver the "goods" military in a way that the INLA has never succeeded in doing, apart, possibly, from a brief period in 1978 and 1979."On top of that was the simple fact that the IPLO acted with impunity in neighborhoods under PIRA control in Belfast. For that matter, they also acted with impunity in front of the Crown forces, carry out attacks on INLA members directly across the street from a RUC barracks and walking around amidst the constant surveillance by camera that occurred in Divis Flats with weapons brandished. The Provos also refused repeated appeals by the IRSM to mediate in the feud with the IPLO. Around that same time, when the IRSM had been left in total disarray by the military attacks from the IPLO, Adams put out a book, wherein he stated that the INLA no longer existed, Sinn Fein published (for one issue) a periodical called An Camcheachta (the name of the IRSP's newspaper), published a long overdue obituary for Seamus Costello, which clearly attempted to lay claim to the legacy of the IRSP's founding Chairperson and Chief of Staff, and I remember well from my experience heading the IRSCNA at the time, that the Provos had a whispering campaign going on, which even reached the US, to make everyone believe the IRSM has simply ceased to exist. The truth of the matter is, were it not for the IRSCNA, the IRSPOWs, and the dedication of Suzanne Bunting, Ronnie's widow, that whispering campaign might well have been true. For several years the Irps in North America, the POWs, and Suzanne were the only thing in the world keeping the name of the IRSM alive. Several leading lights in the IRSP, including Gerry Ruddy, Kevin McQuillen, and Jim Marne left to take refuge in the Liam Mellows Society and Liz Lagrua drifted off to head the Falls Road Women's Center, Jim Lane bolted, virtually everyone in Dublin, Cork, and Limmerick was chased off by the Flynn faction. Ruddy also spent that time getting his Masters degree, by writing a thesis that relied overwhelmingly on quotes from himself (using his "party name") in the third person and denouncing the entire armed struggle. Then that great leader, Cueball sold off the Derry and Dublin offices and ignored anything resembling a party. Until Gino Gallagher stepped forward to raise the IRSM out of the ashes, the IRSP members in the US, allied with the INLA prisoners, and a mere handful, such as Suzanne Bunting, Tony O'Hara, Ray Collins, and Terry Harkin struggled to keep the IRSM alive without either an active party or army, carrying on international relations, publishing our own periodical Irish Workers' Republic, and issuing press statements almost non-stop to the media of the entire world. Gino deserves all the credit for rebuilding the movement, but the members in the US, the members in England, and the INLA POWs deserve the credit for there being anything left for Gino to take hold of and will back into existence. Is there any bitterness for the way we were later rewarded in the events of 2005? Maybe a little...but it doesn't really show, does it?This is an anniversary unlike others on which we recall the valor and commitment of fallen comrades. This is the anniversary of what was almost the beginning of the end for the Irish Republican Socialist Movement. They are days I remember well, though darkly. It was a period of madness and fear. We recognized then the course the Provos had set themselves on and knew only the IRSM stood in their way. For myself, I blame all of the varoius former comrades who allowed themselves to be sucked into that vortext of reaction, but behind the violence I saw and still see the hand of the Provos and Brits, already working in concert to bring the decades of struggle to the pitiful end we witnessed with the Good Friday Agreement. I believe it was the shadowy and of the Provos and the Brits at work again when the noble and heroic Gino Gallagher was murdered and the flood of INLA volunteers who briefly stormed the Sinn Fein office on the Falls when news of Gino's murder was first known demonstrates that I am not the only one who thought the Sinn Fein's leaders were stained with his blood. Right or wrong, perhaps it matters little now. The war was lost and the struggle for an Irish workers' republic set back decades. Bitter as it is to swallow, the reality is that all that is left now is to pick up and start again. If there is a lesson for Irish republican socialists to learn from the events that began with the murder of Ta Power and John O'Reilly, however, it is this: leadership of a revolutionary movement cannot be gained through intercine warfare. It was neither the IPLO nor the INLA who lost in that feud, both organisations continued on for years afterwards. It was the Irish working class that ultimately lost as a result of that feud and noone deserves to wear the moniker republican socialist who would put at risk the fate of our entire class. I joined the IRSM under the Flynn leadership. I worked in the movement when Steenson and Brown were respected names. I met with the leadership when Tom McAllister headed the movement and his mother was or primary contact for our efforts to aid the POWs' children. Bridie Makowski, who went with the IPLO was the IRSM's representative to the founding conference of the IRSCNA. What occurred never should have happended. In hindsight our memories become coloured by events and it is easy to slag off the factions that formed into the IPLO, but many of them had been my comrades at one point or another and some, like Crip McWilliams, later served with distinction within the ranks of the INLA again. One side murdered Ta Power, a member of the other side later published a forged "second writings" in Power's name to advance the agenda of his Trotskyist sect. The fight between the IPLO and the INLA was not a battle over different political views. It was a struggle of egos. Republican socialists whose exploits might have been remembered with pride, allowed themselves to become the tools of imperialists and quislings. Thankfully, comrades in Strabane, Derry, Newry, and Dundalk were relatively unscathed by the madness and thankfully the IRSM, after losing the likes of Costello, Bunting, and Power was still lucky enough to also produce a leader of the calibre of Gino Gallagher. Now the struggle must go on, but those responsible for the dark days of 1987 have more than the blood of a handful of former comrades to atone for; on their hands is the blood of the Irish republican socialist revolution, within a generation at least. Take a moment for silent remberance of those killed on this day those twenty-six years ago, but in that silence think long and hard on the true costs of those murderous acts. Such mistakes cannot be allowed to ever happen again. Peter UrbanComrade, International Republican Socialist Network

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